Audio Describer: Over the next 5 minutes, this introduction will present Dan Guthrie’s new body of work Empty Alcove / Rotting Figure and explain how the show will function. To those listening at home or on the go, welcome.

To those in the gallery, you are waiting in the Resources Area at Spike Island in Bristol. In front of you is a white standalone wall around 13.5m wide. It makes up the long side wall of a rectangular exhibition room with a wide entranceway on the far right. Headsets are hanging near the right edge of the wall. Opposite the wall, there is a table with 6 tablets and 6 chairs, 3 at each side of the table. Large print text across the wall outlines the themes of the show and a Navilens code to the right of this will take you to E-A-R-F-dot-info, an online platform specially designed to host research related to the exhibition, including access materials.

The exhibition features two short films with creative captions by the disabled and queer-led working group, Carefuffle and embedded audio description by global majority collective, SoundScribe. The artist imagines the future of the Blackboy Clock, an object of contested heritage publicly displayed on the side of a Grade II listed former school building in Guthrie’s hometown of Stroud, Gloucestershire, a town about an hour’s drive from Bristol. A mechanised figure of an exoticised Black child strikes a bell on the hour with a long club. Each film puts forward the ‘radical un-conservation’ of the clock; a theoretical term proposed by Guthrie to describe the act of acquiring an object with the intention of destroying it.

In Bristol the century-old debate around Bristol-born Edward Colston’s legacy and statue culminated in the latter being rolled into Bristol Harbour not far from this gallery in 2020. Its toppling set in motion a series of events that led Guthrie to research the Blackboy Clock’s origins, sit on a community-led panel to discuss its future, develop a series of recommendations based off the data gathered from this and co-write a new plaque for the object that went up in Stroud in December 2024. An integrated narration, primarily designed for blind and visually impaired listeners, draws on this atmosphere of discussion while describing visual elements of the films. Each video lasts 5 minutes and the show starts on a 10 minute loop.

The commentary…

Artist [interrupting]: No, let’s be real, it’s a debate…

Audio Describer: As I said, the commentary stages a conversation between a neutral, objective audio describer - that’s me, Elaine Lillian Joseph. You will hear me in your left ear.

Artist: And in your right ear, you’ll hear me, Dan Guthrie, the author of these works, presenting a more subjective perspective to what’s on display. The reason why we have a multi-voice AD is to reflect the wide range of voices that have been involved in these ongoing conversations down in Stroud, something which carries across to our captioning too.

Audio Describer: You can access the introduction and audio description for each video as three separate tracks.

The exhibition room is a rectangle, 7 and a half metres wide by 18.5 metres long with a 8.5 metre high ceiling and natural light through skylights. You will encounter Empty Alcove first. It’s straight ahead of the entryway. A semi-circle of black chairs with backrests, encircles a flat-screen monitor on a 1.5m stand, flanked by two speakers on stands.

Tactile tape flooring across bitumen ground, leads from Empty Alcove to the second work, Rotting Figure, which is housed within a black walled wooden screening room in the centre of the exhibition space. It’s accessible via a wide entranceway and is much darker inside with black carpet.

The commission will be exhibited at Spike Island, Bristol from 8 February – 11 May 2025, and at Chisenhale Gallery, London from 6 June – 17 August 2025. Transcripts of the audio commentary are available at E-A-R-F-dot-info. A visitor gallery assistant is on hand to answer any queries. This is the end of the introduction.